On a spring afternoon inside the cafeteria of South Loop Elementary School, parents filled the small lunch tables for a local school council meeting. Before official business began, Jason Easterly, a longtime member, stood up and abruptly resigned his post.
According to Pauline Lipman, a professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has followed and written about LSCs since their inception, Chicago’s LSCs collectively represent “the largest elected body of people of color of any elected body in the country.” However, Lipman says that LSCs “never fully reached their full potential because they never had the support they need. [Those serving on a council should get time off work to go to educational conferences, have professional development—they’re making important decisions.
A CPS representative can steer a meeting in the right direction, but according to the former Bridgeport LSC member, a former science teacher and now education activist, LSCs usually aren’t penalized for those violations. “I have not heard of any LSCs being punished or reprimanded. I have never heard of that,” she said.
According to its website, CPS offers in-person sessions for a couple of the nine LSC trainings required, and all are available online. New LSC members (elected in April) have until December to complete training.
In several meetings that followed, the LSC chair refused to put the principal vote back on the agenda despite student protests and requests from other LSC members to reconsider, and frequently put public comment last, which critics saw as an attempt to quash their voices. The controversy attracted the attention of Guillermo Montes de Oca, the director of CPS’s Office of LSC Relations, who attended a meeting in May. De Oca told the frustrated crowd that it was not within his office’s authority to interfere in LSC business, as nothing it had done was illegal. “We recommended they give it [the decision] to the new council, but they said no thank you,” said Montes de Oca.
